


Think about the sun, Arlene

by jadelennox



Category: Arlene Sardine - Chris Raschka
Genre: Gen, If you read canon as having suicidal ideation then warning for:, Pre-Canon, Suicidal Ideation, Though far less than canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-01
Updated: 2014-09-01
Packaged: 2018-02-15 19:24:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2240598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jadelennox/pseuds/jadelennox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She just didn't know how to be with her friends when they were willing to settle for the same thing day in and out. <i>My heart is hardened</i>, she thought. <i>I cannot repent these thoughts.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Think about the sun, Arlene

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hhertzof](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hhertzof/gifts).



Arlene had never seen the new sprat before. Perhaps she was a friend of Floyd or Cindy—though really, with ten hundred thousand friends, it wasn't all that surprising if she didn't recognize every brisling's scute pattern or dorsal ray arrangement by sight. Maybe the stranger was a sister or a cousin? Not one of her close buddies, though. Her good friends were all meeting this afternoon to talk about their summer plans: the fishing fleet and then the canneries, they hoped. This stranger, meanwhile, was pestering Arlene about the stranger's own cruddy ideas for summer.

Arlene felt guilty for how irritated she was by someone who was almost certainly one of her ten hundred thousand friends. 

"Don't you want to see the spawning grounds of the Gulf of Riga?" asked the new sprat. "I can't wait until I see all of us swarming in the summer light."

Arlene sucked down a juicy water flea. "Eh," she replied. "Swim all the way to Latvia, spawn, live maybe one more year. It sounds about as unthrilling as a life choice possibly can, not like becoming a sardine."

"Yeah, but—" the strange brisling cut off, shooting after a drifting cloud of copepods. Arlene and a few hundred of their nearest neighbors joined her, snapping up the _Pseudocalanus elongatus_ , the crunch of their tiny shells popping deliciously in her mouth. When the drift was decimated, the school reformed. Arlene was unsurprised to find the stranger swimming beside her once more. "The sun beats down on the warm waters of the gulf, and we all bask in it. There's clusters of _Bosmina maritima_ to eat wherever you go, and way fewer herring poaching on our feeding grounds." The stranger sighed happily, her retractor lentis relaxing as she gazed at some happy inner vision.

Arlene raised one dorsal fin in bemusement. "How would you know? You're just a little brisling like me. _You've_ never been to the summer spawning grounds either."

The stranger's chuff of dry humor chilled Arlene far deeper than the Arctic waters of her home. "I suppose I haven't, then." And she swam off.

Deepest winter was on the fjord, and Arlene usually revelled in the aching, bitter darkness. The biting cold was energizing, and in the darkness the school was everything, ten hundred thousand friends and cousins feeding together, surviving together, living together. The swirling dance in the dark was transcendent, and it was enough for Arlene.

 _Had_ been enough for Arlene.

But as the long nights of winter passed in the Norwegian waters, Arlene found herself imagining summer's light. In her mind there was a gentle warm breeze as she slurped up juicy zooplankton near a surface smoother than any she'd ever swum in. She hunted in darkness with her sisters. As the chatter turned to everyone's opinion on oil vs. water vs. tomato sauce packing, Arlene knew she was dreaming of futures the others had never considered.

"So, what do you think?" asked the stranger, suddenly appearing out of the school a few weeks later. She swam by Arlene's side as if their conversation had only been interrupted a few minutes before.

Arlene glared, annoyed at being startled. "What the heck are you talking about?"

"Summer spawning. Avoiding the purse nets and heading to the southern Baltic. Living out a full life." The stranger swam lazy circles around Arlene. The loops of her dance went against the school, not disrupting it but somehow making it look... lesser. "Think about it, Arlene. A warmth like you've never known. A longer life, making brisling of your own. New places, new currents, new prey, so much new _knowledge_."

Arlene shuddered. The school of brisling seemed to press in, ten hundred thousand prisons, the bodies of her cousins and brothers and sisters hemming her in, keeping her from seeing the world. Surely she could have more than this?

She scooted and twisted until she was at the outskirts of the school, gasping as she struggled for oxygen, her gills aching as if there weren't enough to breathe. In her contortions, she never looked back to see the stranger's smug gaze following her. 

Arlene tried to act normally over the next days, but it was a struggle to spend time with her friends when her head was full of strange thoughts. She ached to tell Bret and Emily and Floyd about the sunlight in her head, but she knew they wouldn't understand. She _wanted_ to stay with them, she really did, despite her burst of claustrophobia. She just didn't know how to be with her friends when they were willing to settle for the same thing day in and out. _My heart is hardened_ , she thought. _I cannot repent these thoughts._

The others could tell she was distrubed, she was sure. They swam gingerly around her, speaking to her warily when her moves in the endless winter dance seemed choppy, off. She swam in a daze, dreaming of seeing new sights so different from the Arctic waters. The voices of her friends drifted above her, only occasionally breaking through her introspection.

"...can't wait to see Estonia!" Emily was saying when she next paid attention.

Floyd looped an enthusiastic loop. "I know, right? I'm so bored of just swimming up here in the dark every day. It's time for something _new_."

 _Wait, what?_ "Estonia?" 

Cindy grinned. "Oh, so now you're back with us?"

Emily butted her head into Cindy's side. "Don't be such a sea trout, Cindy. Like you've never had an off day."

"More like an off month," coughed Cindy, but she subsided at Emily's glare.

"We were just talking about the canneries," Floyd explained, drifting against Arlene's side kindly. "It's almost time for the nets, and soon we can be _sardines_." His voice on the word was reverent.

"Becoming sardines...means going to Estonia," said Arlene, slowly, her thoughts caught in a loop.

Emily shrugged her dorsal rays. "Or Latvia, or Lithuania. Depends who catches us, I suppose. But then imagine it." She trailed off, dreamy.

Bret swam into their cluster and joined in. "The brining. The oil. The smoking!"

The others giggled.

Arlene shook her head, brushing out the fuzziness that had choked her since the stranger's last visit. Staying with her friends didn't mean the same Arctic cold, day in and day out. forever. It mean new sights, new sensations. It meant the canneries in the Baltic States or even further. It mean getting packed with her dearest friends in a 1/4 dingley can.

Yeesh, what kind of weird imaginings had that stranger put in her head?

With the thought, the stranger appeared, right by her side. Bret and Emily and Floyd and the were oblivious nearby, chatting about the canneries and the delicate smoking and the ever-shifting dance, all unaware of the stranger casting a burning, covetous eye on Arlene.

"You would have been glorious in the sunlight's fire," said the stranger.

"I would never have become a brisling sardine with my friends," corrected Arlene. "Never been hermetically sealed in a can."

"Bah," said the stranger. "Why would that have been preferable to what I offered you?"

"You offered me solitude! I have ten hundred thousand friends."

The stranger rippled philosophically. "I tried. And when all the oceans dissolve, every creature shall be purified, and all will be mine."

"Except the hermetically sealed cans."

"Eh. The little fish in hermetically sealed cans will outlast...many things. But all the rest is mine. Farewell, Arlene."

**Author's Note:**

> Sources:
> 
>   * Omid Khorramshahi, J. Marcus Schartau, Ronald H.H. Kröger, A complex system of ligaments and a muscle keep the crystalline lens in place in the eyes of bony fishes (teleosts), Vision Research, Volume 48, Issue 13, June 2008, Pages 1503-1508, ISSN 0042-6989, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.visres.2008.03.017.
>   * Fredrik Arrhenius, Feeding preferences of herring (Clupea harengus) and sprat (Sprattus sprattus) in the southern Baltic Sea. ICES J. Mar. Sci. (2004) 61 (8): 1267-1277 doi:10.1016/j.icesjms.2003.12.011
>   * R. Froese. and D. Pauly. Editors. 2011.FishBase.
>   * And Wikipedia pages for lots of things. Also I suppose _Pippin_ by Stephen Schwartz, the Wizard series by Diane Duane, and _Doctor Faustus_ by Christopher Marlowe. 
> 



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